[fChk]

it may appear pointless to jump all this hoops to use Windows. why not install directly on a partition or usb stick if one has to keep that vhd on an ntfs partition. but i think one could think about security from isolation as a big advantage. you could do whatever you want and get you system as riddled with malwares as you want when inside it. also i see a chance to keep the default boot to lead inside one such vhd for any other user that may want to use your system. security...

booting to vhd is a nice feature . what i think for the use case it is great and open lot of posibility ., for example is virus testing or doing compartment so you only use vhd for browsing for example and another vhd for work . but it is unfortunate that it doesnt support windows version update . microsoft probably abandon this feature . they dont bother to add support to vhd booting

It's quite interesting that in both quotes above there is a misunderstanding of what booting from a VHD is all about. Thus I advice them to re-read section 1.

When a VHD is used to boot from physical hardware -which is this thread's topic- then there is no sandboxing from a security perspective. Your hardware, system boot, all accessible filesystems and shared networked volumes are all exposed to whatever malware/virus you're testing.

If you want the sandboxing security aspect of VHD, you then have to use it inside a VM!.. The Key-Point in using VHD is the portability ascpect, meaning you move it across physical machines as well as VMs. That's all !